The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Creativity as a Way of Being: Poet and Potter M.C. Richards on Wholeness, the Measure of Our Wisdom, and What It Really Means to Be an Artist

Creativity as a Way of Being: Poet and Potter M.C. Richards on Wholeness, the Measure of Our Wisdom, and What It Really Means to Be an Artist

“All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are,” Pablo Neruda observed in his gorgeous Nobel Prize acceptance speech a lifetime after the boyhood revelation that to be an artist, to be a vessel of the creative impulse conveying one human essence to another, is to be the hand through the fence.

Around the same time, another literary artist who made art with her hands — the poet and potter M.C. Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) — shone her mind of immense brightness and penetration on the elusive, mysticism-cloaked reality of what it actually means to be an artist in her 1964 counterculture classic Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (public library), exploring what the wheel teaches about inner wholeness and the poetry of personhood.

Mary Caroline Richards at Black Mountain College (Getty Research Institute. Photographer unknown.)

Richards — who relinquished a tenure-track position at a major university to join the faculty at the experimental Black Mountain College, becoming the school’s most beloved teacher — writes:

The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in his library. Or devout only in church. The material is not the sign of the creative feeling for life: of the warmth and sympathy and reverence which foster being; techniques are not the sign; “art” is not the sign. The sign is the light that dwells within the act, whatever its nature or its medium.

Half a century later, artist and MacArthur fellow Teresita Fernández would echo this sentiment in what remains one of the most insightful and inspiring commencement addresses ever given.

Solar System quilt by Ellen Harding Baker, 1876 — a labor of love seven years in the making, which she used to teach women astronomy in an era when they were barred from formal education. Available as a print.

In a splendid counterpart to John Muir’s insistence on the interconnectedness of the universe without, Richards draws on her potting metaphor of centering to consider the universe within:

As our personal universes expand, if we keep drawing ourselves into center again and again, everything seems to enhance everything else… The activity seems to spring out of the same source: poem or pot, loaf of bread, letter to a friend, a morning’s meditation, a walk in the woods, turning the compost pile, knitting a pair of shoes, weeping with pain, fainting with discouragement, burning with shame, trembling with indecision.

Two and a half millennia after Pythagoras weighed the meaning of wisdom, and in consonance with philosopher-of-forms Ann Hamilton’s lovely notion of creative work as “acts that amplify,” Richard places this creative integration at the heart of human wisdom:

Wisdom is a state of the total being, in which capacities for knowledge and for love, for survival and for death, for imagination, inspiration, intuition, for all the fabulous functioning of this human being who we are, come into a center with their forces, come into an experience of meaning that can voice itself as wise action.

Centering is a magnificent, inspiriting read in its entirety. Complement this small fragment with James Baldwin on what it means to be an artist, in an interview conducted while Richards was composing her book, and E.E. Cummings’s irreverently insightful take on the same slippery question from the same era, then revisit Kahlil Gibran on why we create and Franz Kafka on the point of making art.


Published February 25, 2020

https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/02/25/m-c-richards-centering-creativity/

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